Unknown Ally
by a-leafs-whisper
Summary: The trio is captured & brought to Malfoy Manor, they are seperated. While the others can flee thanks to Dobby's help, Malfoy seizes Harry as his prize for good service & invites Severus and Bellatrix to initiate his new slave. Truths are revealed /mentor


Warnings: Child abuse, violence, slightly sexual themes

**Unknown Ally**

_by a-leafs-whisper _

He awoke to pain in his muscles and a hammering heartbeat that made him deaf for everything else. Carefully Harry tried to open his eyes, yet the pain in his head grew in power and extended down to his neck. Ceasing his efforts in exhaustion he jumped when a voice near his left ear whispered "Stay down, little pet. Yes, just like that."

With all his last power gathered Harry jumped away, into a sitting position and hit a stone wall with his back.

Lucius Malfoy was lifting himself up into a standing position, a predatory gleam in his eyes and a self-assured smile playing on his lips.

"Why so afraid, pet?" He laughed, his voice cold. Harry shivered violently and tried to get to his feet, failing miserably as dizziness made his vision blurry.

"What..." His voice was hoarse with disuse.

"Don't talk unless you are told so. You will obey my word, Potter, or it will be punishment of the worst kind for you. Understood?"

Frowning he looked up at the Malfoy Lord, right in time to see a blue curse flying in his direction from the tip of the snake headed cane. Pain shot through his stomach and made him vomit.

Harry crouched down in an effort to stop the gagging. It only stopped when Malfoy uttered a counter curse.

Breathing heavily he took in his surroundings. His hands touched a black marble floor. He was in a big room, a hall of some sort, the ceiling too high for him to see without his glasses.

Malfoy's boots echoed over the floor as the man neared him again.

"You will listen, Potter. And listen closely for I won't repeat myself."

Malfoy stopped a step away from him and his cane came to rest under Harry's chin. He tried to shift away, but the cane was pushed into his throat to keep him in place.

"You will kneel, or crawl in my presence. You will obey every word. You will only speak when you have my allowance and you will answer my questions truthfully. You will speak with respect. Break one of these rules and I will break you, Potter. Understood?"

Harry frowned and tried again to get the cane to leave him alone. "Go fuck yourself, Mal-"

Malfoy lifted the black cane and let it crash down upon his right shoulder, then hit his jaw with it. Harry groaned and went down onto his stomach again. His whole body hurt.

"What do you-"

His voice was cut off again by something that appeared inside his mouth, fastened by a leather band around his head. He grabbed at it only to find himself suspended in midair, head down, his body spread like a star by invisible bonds.

"Obviously I have to underline my words so that their meaning might reach through to your thick head, pet..."

What had happened? The snatchers, the tent. Hermione and Ron! Where were they?

He was hauled back into the present by a cool breeze touching his skin everywhere. His clothes had vanished. He cursed; the gag made it sound like a hissing noise.

"You will have to beat your rules into him, father. But even so, I doubt his intelligence will be enough to process them..."

The drawled words, the arrogant voice; Draco Malfoy. Harry tried to see who else was in the room, yet he couldn't turn his head, the charm preventing him. Blood was rushing into his head, the ache growing.

Steps on the floor, coming nearer. A pair of dragon hide boots came to a halt in Harry's field of vision. He struggled against the invisible bindings, tried to conceal his genitals or kick Lucius Malfoy in the face.

A hand touched his left leg, fingers stroked over his skin down to his buttocks. Harry cursed again, but all that happened was Draco Malfoy laughing at him.

"Who'd have thought you would be that scrawny, Potter. My, what a hero of the Light. No wonder you are losing."

Harry felt with growing horror how the fingers of his school nemesis went further down his cheeks, teasing his skin. Goose bumps and shivers followed. He felt so helpless, his mind screamed in rage.

"Stand aside, Draco. He will earn his punishment as I see fit."

"Of course, father."

Harry lifted his head weakly up to see Malfoy senior lifting his cane and halting in his movement. Blue eyes were drawn together in a frown.

"Looks as if someone already punished you good and hard, pet. I wonder who it was. Bellatrix perhaps? But no, the scars are old, very old. Has that abomination of humans you call family seen what a bad boy you are?"

Harry felt himself redden in embarrassment, which wouldn't be noticed because of the blood already in his head.

The blows came hard and fast, leaving no time for real screaming. Harry felt the bruises building and did his best to reign in his voice.

As the Lord started to sweat he brushed off his cloak into the hands of a house elf that just appeared for the purpose and vanished soon after accepting the clothing.

"Can't you remove the gag so that we might hear him scream, father? I'd like to hear him howl like moaning myrtle."

The gag vanished and Harry resolved not to make a damn noise just to spite the blonde aristocrats when a new kind of pain chilled his insides.

A whip. And not only leather, as the pain told him. Blood trickled down his legs onto the marble beneath him. His head hurt with the sound of his rising blood pressure. He managed not to scream and just gurgled in pain.

Finally he was lifted and turned, the pressure ceased. Then he fell from the air, landing on his back painfully.

"So, pet. I hope you have managed to keep the rules together. Kneel."

Harry blinked up at the men. He saw an expectant cold gaze from Malfoy senior and an evil grin from Draco Malfoy, who seemed to expect him to fail in obedience and earn another beating.

Slowly Harry got into a sitting position. He was still trying to figure out what to do, when he saw movement from the corner of his eyes.

Snape. The man sat on a black leather sofa, a glass of liquor in his left hand, his ankles crossed and looking in Harry's direction expressionlessly.

Before he had time to throw an insult in the man's general direction, a door behind the man opened to emit Bellatrix LeStrange. He inwardly cringed at the sight of her. She wore a black wide dress and her hair in a bun in her neck, which may have given her an elegant air, if not for the crazy glint in her eyes.

"Bella, how nice of you to join us. Our Lord has allowed me to keep Potter as my pet, in reward for my good services. Maybe I will allow you to play a little with my prize in celebration. Severus has already been invited to pet's initiation."

Harry shuddered at the words and tried again to sit, to lessen the difference in height between him and them.

"Ooooh, how nice. Potty has finally been caught! But why is Potty so bloody all over? It's not nice to meet the House Lord in such a ruffled appearance. Tsk tsk tsk."

Harry closed his eyes tiredly.

"Your last chance to obey, pet."

Harry was spared from answering by a shrill laugh from LeStrange.

"You know how stubborn he is, Lucius. Really, maybe our Lord underestimated your intelligence..."

Malfoy seemed pissed by her rudeness but hid it with a bow in her direction and an inviting gesture.

"Show me how you would go about it, then, my dear colleague, if you are that informed about him."

Harry, who had meanwhile managed a sitting position was searching the room with his eyes frantically, trying to find a way out. But the only door was behind Bellatrix, who now pointed her dark knobbly wand at him.

"Imperio."

All thoughts of flight vanished. His brain emptied and nice, cosy warmth spread through his body. The pain became less important and then a soft voice whispered in his head, telling him to kneel. His legs started to move of their own accord.

Then Harry started to fight, but kept moving. He knelt and laid his hands on his bare upper legs and kept fighting. The curse broke like a wall, leaving his head clearer than it had been before. He shivered.

What should he do?

"See how easy it is to get little Potty doing what you want?"

Malfoy scoffed lightly. "That is no art, Bella. I want him to obey without taking his mind."

"Aw, but you have to start somewhere, right?"

While she was talking she came nearer constantly. Draco had found a place on the sofa, next to Snape. Both kept watching the scene, the former with apt attention, the ladder seemingly bored.

As LeStrange came to a halt next to Harry, still in a verbal battle with the House Lord, Harry let himself fall to the side and kicked her in the kneecaps, flinging himself after her and grabbed her wand.

She screamed as if bitten and her clawing fingers scratched his cheek, yet Harry managed to roll away despite the pain in his back and legs. He lifted the wand, but three wands stood against him and after the first curse brushed his earlobe he lost his footing in another wave of dizziness and fell over a rug. The second and third curse found their goals.

Harry screamed in pain.

"Now, after your great show of competence, Bella my dear, let Lucius proceed his way." The new voice sent a chill down Harry's spine. Voldemort. The man had entered through the door and was standing proudly with his arms crossed. Snape, the Malfoys and Bellatrix bowed in greeting until the man gestured for them to sit comfortable again.

"If you had informed yourself better, you had known that Potter was able to fight the Imperious curse since he was fourteen. His pigheadedness is too great for such matters."

Harry was breathing hard, his mind racing. He had lost the wand to Draco who had kicked it out of his cramping fingers.

Malfoy senior stood over him again. Harry tried to hide his nudity in shame as the steel blue eyes roamed his body.

"Fuck off!" Harry coughed.

That earned him another suspension in midair, this time with his head on eye level with Lucius Malfoy's, facing the gathering. Voldemort had occupied an armchair and accepted a glass of liquor from Draco Malfoy.

"You will obey me, Potter. I have time. You have none. Human beings are so easy to break. Water and food, warmth and light, there are so many things the human body craves. I wonder what it is that will make you give in. Light, perhaps?"

Harry was doing his best to keep his emotions hidden, tiredness making the battle hard. He hated darkness. It always reminded him of the cupboard. But he didn't fear it. Malfoy seemed to have seen the truth in his eyes, changing tact.

"Or maybe, seeing you blush so wonderfully whenever you are touched, it is your privacy that you most cherish? Like our good Severus over there?"

Malfoy turned to look at Snape, who emptied his glass and put it down on a small side table, seemingly uninterested in what the Malfoy Lord thought of him.

"Can you manage to find his most private memories and show them to us, my dear Severusss?"

Snape stood as his Master spoke to him and bowed elegantly.

"Of course, my Lord."

Harry instinctively closed his eyes as Snape searched for his gaze, his face an expressionless mask. He had expected to see loathing in the black eyes, but there was just a strange emptiness. A cool hand touched his cheekbone, not bruising, but strong enough to turn his head slightly.

"Look at me."

Harry didn't obey, but held his eyes tightly shut. As soon as cool fingers touched his manhood and pain shot through his sensitive skin Harry looked what Snape was doing in panic and the trap snapped shut.

The sensation, although familiar, was nothing Harry had ever experienced. Through their Occlumency lessons Snape must have been utterly gentle, in comparison to how he raged through Harry's mind there and then.

The little barriers Harry had erected to shut down his most painful and humiliating memories just broke like glass walls as Snape went right through them without hesitation. He felt the dark presence filter through his memories and then an abrupt stop. The presence was still for a moment. Snape seemed surprised and thoughtful. Harry wondered what exactly he had found, but then realised it. The memories came to the forefront of his mind. His uncle. The cupboard, the beatings. Lying in his own blood and shit for days.

Harry screamed in agony as a memory thread was snatched from his mind and opened his eyes to a vision of his uncle. For a split second he tried to duck as the beefy figure raised a belt, but the belt went down next to him, onto the back of a younger version of himself. Harry stared in shock.

Somehow Snape had managed to project the memory on the rug in front of the armchair. Lucius, Bella, Draco and Voldemort himself sat watching it.

The vision-Harry, maybe ten years old, was trying hard not to cry as the belt buckle went down onto his already bruised back.

Bellatrix cackled like mad and Riddle, to Harry's utter astonishment, muttered something about abusive muggles with a hateful stare that was obviously directed at his uncle and not at him, Harry.

His eyes found Snape, who still had his right hand pressed into Harry's throat and jaw. He, too, was watching the memory, disgust clearly visible in his features.

The second was over and in the next moment Harry felt Snape's hand over his mouth and something cool pressed into his bound hand. Then a familiar hated but welcome tugging behind his navel and the scene vanished into a mist of colours as the world spun around.

With a painful thud Harry landed on his side, groaning.

Snape's hand was still over his mouth as the man knelt down beside him.

"Ssh, be quiet. We have to hurry, so listen silently."

Harry nodded. He smelled grass and forest grounds in the darkness. His confusion urged him to ask a thousand questions, scream a thousand emotions at the dour looking man beside him, but he was too tired for any of that. Snape had somehow managed to rescue him, at least that was what it looked like.

"Good. Do you have means to contact your friends?"

"They were captured, too." Harry croaked and coughed a little blood.

"They escaped, together with Lovegood and Oliwanders. Your House-elf-friend helped them. Can you contact them?"

Harry blinked and frowned. "How do I know it's not a fucking trap to get them back?" he whispered. Snape, in the process of getting Harry more comfortable, looked into his eyes and Harry was ashamed of his words as there was a flicker of hurt in them.

"Listen, Po- Harry. I have no safe house, I had no time to plan farther than the here and now. We need to hurry, there are charms to track down portkeys. And this one wasn't very good, created wand- and wordlessly by myself. If there is a way to get in contact with your camping friends then, by all means, do it now."

Harry nodded.

"Give me your wand."

He didn't expect the man to obey his command. To give away his wand, even with Harry as injured and weak as he was, meant Snape gave his life into his hands. Every doubt he might have harboured after Snape's stricken look at his words vanished as the ebony wand lay in his right hand, although this was still no evidence of the man's good intentions.

Harry conjured all his hopes into the spell and finally the stag appeared beside them.

"Tell 'Mione to meet us at the lake were we left the dragon."

The patronus vanished. Harry gathered his last magical strength, clutching Snape's arm and sidealonged the man with him to the lake. He had no idea how far it was, but the desperate wish to be safe spurned him on.

When he next opened his eyes, Snape was lying in one piece next to him, breathing hard, his elegant eyebrows nearly touching in the moonlight.

"Only a Gryffindor like yourself can manage such a foolhardy stunt! You could have been splinted, or worse, killed us both in the process!"

Harry was spared an answer as two voices screamed next to them. Snape fell from his sitting position to his side, his hands bound behind his back. The wand flew to Hermione's outstretched hand.

"Harry!" She threw herself down next to him, no longer sparing Snape a glance. Ron stood pointing his wand at the man.

"Blimey mate, we thought we'd lost you. And you even managed to capture the scarecrow."

Harry coughed and laughed in relief and rued it at the same time as his lungs hurt.

"No... " He tried to catch his breath, but failed. Hermione looked from him to Snape and back frowning.

"He saved you?"

Harry just nodded and slowly closed his tired eyes. And then he knew no more.

HPSS

He came to warmth and comfortable softness. Only his back hurt, but his head was clear and his sight only as blurry as it got when he had no glasses.

He was lying on his stomach, a soft pillow under his head. Hermione's and Ron's voices could be heard from a nearby room, obviously in the middle of their usual bickering over something unimportant.

He jumped when a hand touched his neck; his lifted head was brought back down onto the pillow gently.

"Don't move too much."

Snape. The man was sitting on the side of the bed he was lying on. They were in the living room of the tent Hermione, Ron and he had travelled in so far. A nice fire let shadows dance over the many multicoloured rugs and furs on the wooden floorboards.

Harry gazed into dark eyes that looked at him as if to scrutinize him, examine every detail about him. Often had Snape looked at him as if he was something the man couldn't fathom; now the look was entirely different, somehow. It took Harry's brain a moment to come up with what was different about it; there was no malice or loathing in Snape's eyes, no ill intent or bad expectations of him. Instead there was a searching openness in the serious features of the Potions Master.

"When did he start?"

"Who?" Bewildered, Harry tried again to sit up, but Snape's hand stayed where it was and pushed him gently back down.

"Don't move. Your back is still healing."

Snape gently stroked a lock of Harry's unruly hair back out of his face.

"Your uncle."

"Huh?... I dunno... Can't remember."

Snape huffed, his eyes becoming sad. Harry blinked repeatedly in an effort to bring the two Snape's, the spiteful hating one and the empathetic one, together and form one person. He didn't quite manage.

"Why did you kill him?"

Their gazes were glued together, not in battle like in the past, more in a kind of river they were filling with their emotions.

"He was injured lethally. The curse in is hand. We could find no counter curse... I made an unbreakable vow to protect Draco with my life and the Dark Lord had given him the task of killing Albus. To punish his father..."

There was a pause in which Harry tried to put the pieces together.

Snape's next words let the carefully built construct tumble down into a hundred pieces again.

"I am sorry I misjudged you so, Harry."

Harry swallowed. Looking up again and finding only honesty in the black pools, he nodded.

"And I'm sorry about how I misjudged you. I guess we are even."

"No, we aren't. Don't be so quick to forgive, Harry. I'm the adult. I should have known Petunia would not look kindly onto a magical child."

"You knew her, too?"

"Yes. I have to admit, I knew her quite well. Which makes it all the more absurd that I didn't see who you are, in what a situation you were."

Harry didn't know what to answer to that. He felt ashamed that anyone had seen his childhood horrors, let alone Severus Snape of all people.

"Don't tell Ron and 'Mione, please. They'd go straight to find them and commit murder." He smiled timidly. Snape didn't smile back, his expression getting stonier by the second and Harry got the distinctive impression that Snape himself was about to march to the Dursleys and ask them some questions. He hoped the man wouldn't do that.

Yawning he realised that Snape was about to tuck him in more firmly and blushed as he noticed that he was still naked underneath the covers. But tiredness and exhaustion banished all thoughts of propriety and he closed his eyes to the deep baritone of his ex-teacher murmuring "They won't harm you again, Harry, I promise."

Some meters away, Ronald Weasely's mouth opened, doing a perfect imitation of a goldfish while his girlfriend smiled broadly at the back of the black clad man who was sitting by their friend, stroking the messy black hair.

HPSS

_Hope you enjoyed it! Please give me some feedback! _

_whisper_


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